Apple sells estimated 1.4M Macs in US to capture 8% market share
Even if true, probably much of that is the result of Apple's exposure through iPhone and iPod. Historically, Apple market share is 3-5%, and that's what they're likely going to go back to in a competitive market.
Not only did I have my PC hardware fail a number of tymes, I also had to reinstall Windows a number of tymes which each PC.
And that has to do with Apple's bad software engineering... what?
On the one hand, I really hope that Apple gets what they deserve: for three decades, they have been copying, cloning, and stealing other people's ideas and not giving anything significant back. The should finally be held accountable, publicly and openly.
On the other hand, I think the best for the market would be if all these patents ended up being unenforceable on all sides. Then the market will take care of the problem by itself: Apple will settle at its usual 3-5% market share and the rest of us can go back to ignoring them, except for occasionally making fun of their bad software engineering and pompous commercials.
As for your last statement: I guess that makes you addicted to your tools. Going from milkshape to blender was innitally a disaster for me, until I realized there was a workflow. I would image it would be a lot worse if I had actually learned to use a real 3D application, and properly learned it. I would ask "where is my buttons?!", and "where is my workflow?!".
Geometry is not a question of tools or workflow or preference, it's a question of mathematics. Blender does not provide the user with a reasonably complete, standard set of geometric operations. And the consequence is not just that I'm frustrated, it's that if you look at tutorials and other people's workflows, even geometrically simple operations are really cumbersome. Nobody manages to construct 3D objects elegantly or efficiently with Blender, even people who are really experienced with it.
Have a look at how ridiculously and unnecessary complicated this is:
The reparations for the Japanese American internment camps was signed into law in 1988. That's 46 years after the fact.
Yes, and just about 46 years after European nations committed massive genocide. Germany, of course, didn't have a choice but to pay reparations earlier, since it was forced to do so by the allies.
Women got to vote in the US in 1920 (though some states were earlier to allow them to vote in local elections). By this time, many countries in Europe already had universal suffrage.
Yes, and only a few decades later, many of those European countries turned into totalitarian regimes and murdered millions of Jews and other minorities.
Slavery was abolished in the US after the civil war, with the 13th amendment in 1865. By that time, even former primary slavery nations like Tunesia or the Ottoman Empire had long abolished it.
And where are they now?
In fact, had you guys remained a part of the British Empire, slavery would have been illegal more than 50 years earlier.
Despite what a prominent German politician once said, repeating a lie often enough doesn't make it believable or true.
And let's not even talk about the civil rights for blacks, USA 1964 - by that time, the rest of the world (minus south africa) had a hard time understanding how blacks could not have the same rights.
Of course, those oh-so-superior European nations, in practice, are racist and discriminatory to this very day, as statistics and polls show.
So yes, the US has reversed its ways in many of these things - but always as a follower, never as a leader.
What a joke. Many European nations still haven't caught up with the US on civil rights. European intellectuals like to talk a lot, but the situation on the ground is, sadly, different.
I think you must elaborate your points, because they are currently far too shallow for me to interpret.
Blender doesn't use standard UI conventions: its menu bar is different, its shortcuts are different, its toolbars behave different, etc. All that makes learning hard when people are trying already to wrap their head around Blender's view of 3D modeling.
Other problems are that it shows tons of information by default that's irrelevant to many users. The UI and objects can be in lots of modes that aren't clearly indicated. There are no wizards for common operations and the help system isn't well integrated either.
Of course, nobody owes anybody such features. Nevertheless, they could be added without making Blender any harder to use for experienced users.
And there's another problem with Blender...
learning blender as a 3D newb
I'm not a 3D newb at all. Part of what makes Blender so frustrating and hard to use is its incomplete and haphazard support for 3D geometry: points, lines, angles, joins, spans, constraints, coincidences, minimal surfaces, refinements, CSG etc. It's not that Blender can't do the calculations, it's that these operations just aren't exposed in a consistent way.
So... should UI's of a specialized program be designed to be easy to learn, or very efficient once learned? There are definitely arguments for each of those
Tools like SketchUp show that user interfaces in 3D building tools don't have to suck as badly as Blender. The fact that Maya and tons of other tools are equally obscure doesn't change that.
I find Blender an enormously frustrating program. It's clearly very powerful and I've done some nice things with it myself. But the user interface is confusing. Blender 2.5 was supposed to fix that, but it's just as confusing only in a different way. For starters, put big undo/redo buttons prominently into the interface to help people get started, and start respecting some standard UI conventions.
I disagree. A terrible idea with a beautifully executed development goes no where. A great idea that is hacked together with shell scripts and kilometers of spaghetti code can make someone a fortune and (lame as it sounds) change the world.
Any moron can follow the book and produce "beautifully executed" code, given time and resources. You need someone really smart to actually hack together anything with shell scripts and kilometers of spaghetti code quickly, before the competition beats you to market with "your" great idea.
The government lied about the reasons to going to war in Iraq. They waved around reports and papers and said it all proved why we need to go in. We believed the government. Now we find out they lied...well that sucks.
If there had been no other information source than the government, you'd have a point. But the facts were out there and widely published, and it was clear before the US even went to war that the US government was lying, just like it has every time the US has gone to war. It's apparently part and parcel of war in a democracy.
I was against these wars. But most Americans apparently wanted to be deceived: they were angry and confused, somebody had to pay, and they didn't want to have their conscience burdened by facts. And it's no different in other democracies.
Now that that wars have run their course, the US is hundreds of billions of dollars poorer and has a PR problem, and two nations are rid of totalitarian regimes and have a chance at democracy, not such a horrible outcome either.
America is finally starting to reach the boiling point. Will the public explode and start fighting the government?
Why should they? The government is giving Americans what they want, including someone to blame when things go wrong. It works the same way in other democracies.
The Tea Party movement was an attempt to break away from the 2 party system in this country.
If you look at Europe, multi-party systems work no better. European governments lie as well, and they just coalesce into government and opposition quickly, and the minority coalition partners basically get completely subsumed in the majority partner's program.
No, you're right. WikiLeaks hasn't done that. They just distribute the information. What happens after that is up to you.
No, they didn't even do that. They distributed information about uncounted Iraqi deaths, and then semi-literate people with an axe to grind interpret that to be killings by Americans.
Doubtlessly, the US did kill innocent people and covered it up; that happens in every war. Wikileaks, however, has done little to help with uncovering that.
Don't get me wrong: I don't mind Wikileaks, but their importance is vastly exaggerated, and they are clearly being used and misrepresented for propaganda purposes.
You may laught at this, but you find the same thing in all fields. Programming language designers are writing papers on decades old language features, user interface researchers are getting lots of citations for decades old ideas or gimmicks from scifi movies, and theoretical computer science authors are woefully ignorant of statistics and machine learning. Mathematicians and physicists aren't immune either.
WikiLeaks is showing that there are multiple problems with the government in the US.
And you needed WikiLeaks to figure that out? Of course, the US government lied, just like it has for every war that we have ever entered. To anybody with half a brain, that was clear before we even entered these wars, as was the fact that lots of civilians would lose their lives and that US soldiers would commit war crimes, like all soldiers in all wars. Bush went into these wars with high approval ratings. Americans wanted this, despite the clear evidence on the table at the time, and now they don't want to take the responsibility for the waste of money and time it has been. Europeans are just as bad, living with the delusion that they aren't part of this, all the while their governments clearly participate and back pretty much everything the US did, and they and their corporations profit handsomely. Wake up, people, you're just looking for excuses to assuage your guilty consciences.
The real problem is the US government killed innocent people and covered it up.
That may well be the case, but it is not what Wikileaks has shown. Wikileaks showed that Iraqis killed more Iraqis than we previously suspected and the US didn't keep a full tally.
Forcing the government to admit it's illegal actions is the right thing to do.
It is the right thing to do, but Wikileaks hasn't done that.
In China, internet traffic which has been deemed by the party as "unharmonious" is essentially completely blocked and even attempting to use those services can lead to jail time.
Really? I used to think that, but I have not been able to find evidence for that. As far as I can tell, plenty of people circumvent the great Chinese firewall without consequences.
(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;
What would you have the US military do?
(2) the State Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;
And Germany refused to take back its own innocent resident, letting him rot in US prison for several years, because German politicians just found it inconvenient.
(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;
Yes; killed by Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence. Ultimately, that's not America's problem, since Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence existed prior to the US invasion and was even worse then.
(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by the WikiLeaks documents;
Yup, just like British, French, and German leaders. Same goes for your remaining points: governments lie, even in democracies. If there is anything at all unusual about the US is that people actually are bothered by it more. Europeans just seem to shrug their shoulders and move on to discussing raising their benefits packages.
And Europe has actively supported US invasions and illegal renditions, Europeans are bigger arms dealers than Americans, and they sweep right in taking advantage of business opportunities created by US action. The only thing Europeans are better at is shifting blame. Sweden is even using Interpol to hunt down Assange.
Sorry, but if the Chinese think the internet is controllable, it is because the US is showing them how to.
Not just the US; Europe is at least as active censoring and exporting censorship technologies to China. Europe is building the technologies for domestic "applications" like data retention and web site blocking.
Slashdot Mirror
With any luck, Apple will learn as time goes by.
They haven't in the past 30 years, why should they in the next?
He's not preventing any content from reaching you -- any content you imagine can be put on a web site, and Safari will deliver it
Except when it's Flash or any of a number of codecs or scripting languages Apple disapproves of.
Apple sells estimated 1.4M Macs in US to capture 8% market share
Even if true, probably much of that is the result of Apple's exposure through iPhone and iPod. Historically, Apple market share is 3-5%, and that's what they're likely going to go back to in a competitive market.
Not only did I have my PC hardware fail a number of tymes, I also had to reinstall Windows a number of tymes which each PC.
And that has to do with Apple's bad software engineering... what?
Xerox, IBM, Bell Labs, Palm, Nokia, Psion, Danger, Handspring, Diamond, Creative, Adobe, lots of academic research labs, lots of startups.
Pray tell us, what original ideas has Apple ever actually had? What original contributions have they made to computer science or even the market?
Yeah, he has to deal with the law as it is. But the Swedish law is objectively stupid and degrading to women.
On the one hand, I really hope that Apple gets what they deserve: for three decades, they have been copying, cloning, and stealing other people's ideas and not giving anything significant back. The should finally be held accountable, publicly and openly.
On the other hand, I think the best for the market would be if all these patents ended up being unenforceable on all sides. Then the market will take care of the problem by itself: Apple will settle at its usual 3-5% market share and the rest of us can go back to ignoring them, except for occasionally making fun of their bad software engineering and pompous commercials.
As for your last statement: I guess that makes you addicted to your tools. Going from milkshape to blender was innitally a disaster for me, until I realized there was a workflow. I would image it would be a lot worse if I had actually learned to use a real 3D application, and properly learned it. I would ask "where is my buttons?!", and "where is my workflow?!".
Geometry is not a question of tools or workflow or preference, it's a question of mathematics. Blender does not provide the user with a reasonably complete, standard set of geometric operations. And the consequence is not just that I'm frustrated, it's that if you look at tutorials and other people's workflows, even geometrically simple operations are really cumbersome. Nobody manages to construct 3D objects elegantly or efficiently with Blender, even people who are really experienced with it.
Have a look at how ridiculously and unnecessary complicated this is:
http://vimeo.com/785249
Tracing an outline should not require extruding little edge segments.
The reparations for the Japanese American internment camps was signed into law in 1988. That's 46 years after the fact.
Yes, and just about 46 years after European nations committed massive genocide. Germany, of course, didn't have a choice but to pay reparations earlier, since it was forced to do so by the allies.
Women got to vote in the US in 1920 (though some states were earlier to allow them to vote in local elections). By this time, many countries in Europe already had universal suffrage.
Yes, and only a few decades later, many of those European countries turned into totalitarian regimes and murdered millions of Jews and other minorities.
Slavery was abolished in the US after the civil war, with the 13th amendment in 1865. By that time, even former primary slavery nations like Tunesia or the Ottoman Empire had long abolished it.
And where are they now?
In fact, had you guys remained a part of the British Empire, slavery would have been illegal more than 50 years earlier.
Despite what a prominent German politician once said, repeating a lie often enough doesn't make it believable or true.
And let's not even talk about the civil rights for blacks, USA 1964 - by that time, the rest of the world (minus south africa) had a hard time understanding how blacks could not have the same rights.
Of course, those oh-so-superior European nations, in practice, are racist and discriminatory to this very day, as statistics and polls show.
So yes, the US has reversed its ways in many of these things - but always as a follower, never as a leader.
What a joke. Many European nations still haven't caught up with the US on civil rights. European intellectuals like to talk a lot, but the situation on the ground is, sadly, different.
I think you must elaborate your points, because they are currently far too shallow for me to interpret.
Blender doesn't use standard UI conventions: its menu bar is different, its shortcuts are different, its toolbars behave different, etc. All that makes learning hard when people are trying already to wrap their head around Blender's view of 3D modeling.
Other problems are that it shows tons of information by default that's irrelevant to many users. The UI and objects can be in lots of modes that aren't clearly indicated. There are no wizards for common operations and the help system isn't well integrated either.
Of course, nobody owes anybody such features. Nevertheless, they could be added without making Blender any harder to use for experienced users.
And there's another problem with Blender...
learning blender as a 3D newb
I'm not a 3D newb at all. Part of what makes Blender so frustrating and hard to use is its incomplete and haphazard support for 3D geometry: points, lines, angles, joins, spans, constraints, coincidences, minimal surfaces, refinements, CSG etc. It's not that Blender can't do the calculations, it's that these operations just aren't exposed in a consistent way.
So... should UI's of a specialized program be designed to be easy to learn, or very efficient once learned? There are definitely arguments for each of those
It's not an either/or proposition.
Tools like SketchUp show that user interfaces in 3D building tools don't have to suck as badly as Blender. The fact that Maya and tons of other tools are equally obscure doesn't change that.
How about sane shortcuts? Undo is ctrl+z in every single application, also in blender!
Doesn't work in 2.55 beta on Linux. Blender also needs Alt-click with no substitute.
Another point to make: Buttons is really really bad for the workflow, when they are not needed.
But they are needed by beginners, so that they don't have to worry about shortcuts at the same time they have to worry about everything else.
Respecting UI standards would ruin blender.
A menu bar, a few optional toolbars, a context sensitive menu, and standard keyboard shortcuts are going to kill Blender? I don't think so.
I find Blender an enormously frustrating program. It's clearly very powerful and I've done some nice things with it myself. But the user interface is confusing. Blender 2.5 was supposed to fix that, but it's just as confusing only in a different way. For starters, put big undo/redo buttons prominently into the interface to help people get started, and start respecting some standard UI conventions.
I disagree. A terrible idea with a beautifully executed development goes no where. A great idea that is hacked together with shell scripts and kilometers of spaghetti code can make someone a fortune and (lame as it sounds) change the world.
Any moron can follow the book and produce "beautifully executed" code, given time and resources. You need someone really smart to actually hack together anything with shell scripts and kilometers of spaghetti code quickly, before the competition beats you to market with "your" great idea.
The government lied about the reasons to going to war in Iraq. They waved around reports and papers and said it all proved why we need to go in. We believed the government. Now we find out they lied...well that sucks.
If there had been no other information source than the government, you'd have a point. But the facts were out there and widely published, and it was clear before the US even went to war that the US government was lying, just like it has every time the US has gone to war. It's apparently part and parcel of war in a democracy.
I was against these wars. But most Americans apparently wanted to be deceived: they were angry and confused, somebody had to pay, and they didn't want to have their conscience burdened by facts. And it's no different in other democracies.
Now that that wars have run their course, the US is hundreds of billions of dollars poorer and has a PR problem, and two nations are rid of totalitarian regimes and have a chance at democracy, not such a horrible outcome either.
America is finally starting to reach the boiling point. Will the public explode and start fighting the government?
Why should they? The government is giving Americans what they want, including someone to blame when things go wrong. It works the same way in other democracies.
The Tea Party movement was an attempt to break away from the 2 party system in this country.
If you look at Europe, multi-party systems work no better. European governments lie as well, and they just coalesce into government and opposition quickly, and the minority coalition partners basically get completely subsumed in the majority partner's program.
No, you're right. WikiLeaks hasn't done that. They just distribute the information. What happens after that is up to you.
No, they didn't even do that. They distributed information about uncounted Iraqi deaths, and then semi-literate people with an axe to grind interpret that to be killings by Americans.
Doubtlessly, the US did kill innocent people and covered it up; that happens in every war. Wikileaks, however, has done little to help with uncovering that.
Don't get me wrong: I don't mind Wikileaks, but their importance is vastly exaggerated, and they are clearly being used and misrepresented for propaganda purposes.
You may laught at this, but you find the same thing in all fields. Programming language designers are writing papers on decades old language features, user interface researchers are getting lots of citations for decades old ideas or gimmicks from scifi movies, and theoretical computer science authors are woefully ignorant of statistics and machine learning. Mathematicians and physicists aren't immune either.
WikiLeaks is showing that there are multiple problems with the government in the US.
And you needed WikiLeaks to figure that out? Of course, the US government lied, just like it has for every war that we have ever entered. To anybody with half a brain, that was clear before we even entered these wars, as was the fact that lots of civilians would lose their lives and that US soldiers would commit war crimes, like all soldiers in all wars. Bush went into these wars with high approval ratings. Americans wanted this, despite the clear evidence on the table at the time, and now they don't want to take the responsibility for the waste of money and time it has been. Europeans are just as bad, living with the delusion that they aren't part of this, all the while their governments clearly participate and back pretty much everything the US did, and they and their corporations profit handsomely. Wake up, people, you're just looking for excuses to assuage your guilty consciences.
The real problem is the US government killed innocent people and covered it up.
That may well be the case, but it is not what Wikileaks has shown. Wikileaks showed that Iraqis killed more Iraqis than we previously suspected and the US didn't keep a full tally.
Forcing the government to admit it's illegal actions is the right thing to do.
It is the right thing to do, but Wikileaks hasn't done that.
Again, where does it say that circumventing the Great Chinese Firewall is illegal?
People seem to flaunt this pretty openly:
http://asia.cnet.com/blogs/sinobytes/post.htm?id=63014818
Making modern multicore apps with Gtk+ is easy. If the GUI library constrains you, you are using it wrong.
In China, internet traffic which has been deemed by the party as "unharmonious" is essentially completely blocked and even attempting to use those services can lead to jail time.
Really? I used to think that, but I have not been able to find evidence for that. As far as I can tell, plenty of people circumvent the great Chinese firewall without consequences.
(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;
What would you have the US military do?
(2) the State Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;
And Germany refused to take back its own innocent resident, letting him rot in US prison for several years, because German politicians just found it inconvenient.
(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;
Yes; killed by Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence. Ultimately, that's not America's problem, since Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence existed prior to the US invasion and was even worse then.
(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by the WikiLeaks documents;
Yup, just like British, French, and German leaders. Same goes for your remaining points: governments lie, even in democracies. If there is anything at all unusual about the US is that people actually are bothered by it more. Europeans just seem to shrug their shoulders and move on to discussing raising their benefits packages.
WHICH nation ...
And Europe has actively supported US invasions and illegal renditions, Europeans are bigger arms dealers than Americans, and they sweep right in taking advantage of business opportunities created by US action. The only thing Europeans are better at is shifting blame. Sweden is even using Interpol to hunt down Assange.
Sorry, but if the Chinese think the internet is controllable, it is because the US is showing them how to.
Not just the US; Europe is at least as active censoring and exporting censorship technologies to China. Europe is building the technologies for domestic "applications" like data retention and web site blocking.
SuperKendall would only be happy if the government mandated the installation of iMacs and iPods in every car.